Recruiting with a big stick

February 10, 2010 – Today, we’re unveiling the second in our series of lists documenting the online world’s Most Influential People in HR and its subsets. This list, the Top 25 Most Influential Online Recruiters picks up where the First Top 25 list left off. That list, you might recall, surveyed the Top 25 Online Influencers in all of HR.

Once again, we’ve partnered with Traackr, the Boston based online reputation discovery tool, to develop the list. Traackr is a fantastic way to identify the most widely seen and read individuals in a variety of niches. Their expertise is the discovery and ranking of people in very specific niches. Traackr uses a combination of spidering, processing and analytics to develop its lists.

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In order to really quantify the dimensions of online influence, Traackr measures three key variables:

Reach: A measure of the audience size (number of eyeballs) for each individual. Traffic.

Relevance: The degree to which content associated with the individual matches a cloud of keywords prepared for the analysis

Resonance: The number of mentions, inbound links and participation found for each individual.

The process is amazing. Given a starter list of key words, Traackr spiders the web based on searches for those search terms. That massive pile of data is then sorted and sifted in Traackr’s analytic sandbox. Links, references, content, name duplication are all identified, assessed and reexamined. Ultimately, after a number of spider-analyze-spider iterations, the list starts to take shape.

Jason Buss is doing some amazing things at the The Talent Buzz. His blog is a constant and useful flow of commentary and information designed for the HR/Recruiting community. It’s no accident that he is the top ranked person on our list of the Top 25 Online Influencers in Recruiting. (You ought to subscribe to his rss feed.)

These lists cover the universe that exists entirely within the walls of Twitter. He estimates that there are over 10,000 recruiters who are active in some way on twitter. These lists are a nice complement to our project which takes a broader look at the online recruiting coral reef. We used Jason’s lists as one reference and validation point in the search-analyze-search process.

There is always a question of validation. In the first iteration of the process (The Most Influential People in HR List), the validation point was the discovery of novelty. Of the 25 people on the list, only 17 were known to the review board. For this Top 25 Recruiters list, we validated with a list of five names that probably ought to be on the list.

Interestingly, the first draft of the list (after two weeks of data processing) didn’t have Shally on it. It’s hard to imagine a list of influential people in online Recruiting that doesn’t include Shally Steckerl. After some review, we discovered that Shally was not particularly active (up to normal standards) towards the end of the year. We had to broaden the window and redo the analysis to make sure the list included his work.

We learned something really interesting about the world of online Recruiting. It’s very “present tense”. The online world is a “what have you done for me lately” environment that demands the attention span of a twitter addict. If you don’t stay current, you fall off the edge of consciousness.

As we continue this experiment in the measurement of online influence, we’re continuing to learn. The Shally example suggests that influence might have two components: current immediate influence and long term impact. The long term is a measure of quality that is harder to measure.

The list we present today is like any contemporary hits list. The positions are not inevitable, they are just the positions this month. It’s a rapidly changing world out there and it’s likely that many of these names will not be on the 2011 version of the list.

Here are some interesting statistics.

While the list is fairly US-centric, about 25% of the influencers are international.

About 50% of the influencers are working recruiters

About 50% work in vendors or other institutions that support the recruiting industry.

30% are women

100% have a blog

40% have more than one blog

On average, an influencer has seven different presences in social media (LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs etc)

100% of the Influencers have LinkedIn accounts

96% are on Twitter.

88% are on Facebook

We’d love to get your feedback on the list and the meaning of online influence.